Posting this here because I want to use Cyberpunk as an example. I would LOVE to get a Cyberpunk series that looks as good as their cinematics.
I liked Edgerunners but I'm not a huge anime guy, so if we ever saw another Cyberpunk TV series, I'd love for it to look more like the cinematics.
That then lead me to the question, why have we never seen a show like this before? Not necessarily just Cyberpunk, I mean, ever?
Is it just way too expensive? Or are the cinematics motion cap and at that point, they might as well make a live action show?
I realise this is probably an obvious and dumb question and apologies to the mods if this post isn't relevant enough to Cyberpunk to ask here.
41 Comments
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Yes, it is very expensive.
You sort of already did!
It’s Death Love and Robots!
As others have said very expensive but there is also the time factor, example the invincible animated show takes about a year and a half to make the short cinematic for cyberpunk take about half that for a max 6 min cinematic, imagine how long it’ll take for a full show
It’s very expansive and it takes a long time to make. To make a full season like this will takes years.
At best we see animated movies like this like the 2 Final Fantasy movies Advent Children and Kingsglaive, but it’s expensive and most likely quite difficult to do with no real guarantee that it’d make its money back.
Mean like Beowulf movie? Seems it’s tried every so often as the cgi animation advances. Issue is people usually hate on it as it blurs the lines between live action and traditional animation.
It is expensive and get dated very very quickly.
Hmm… for a TV series you need about one episode a week. IMO the whole amount of cinematic in PL is the same as one TV episode.
So it would be too expensive.
Why would you make an animated show that looks life-like, when you can just have life action with CGI? Or just do mo-cap.
Animating characters is hard. Filming an actor and replacing backgrounds and adding other CGI is much easier.
Arcane looks kinda like a video game to me – and it took like six years 😂
A pure video game look is not super attractive tbh versus other options perhaps (like Pixar could probably do a “video game”-esque movie at similar cost to their other endeavors but it probably wouldn’t do as well as a different animation style).
🤷🏻♂️ of course I’d love it 😅
That’s what Final Fantasy Advent Children basically was.
Check out Harlock Space Pirate.
The Cinematics are made by studios that specialize in them and it takes them months or years to do a few minutes of animation. There was a Final Fantasy money where they put out a feature length film instead of a small trailer. It was a massive financial flop IIRC. Like a half billion was invested and they got back tens of millions. It was a Sony project so they were able to take the loss but most companies cannot take on that kind of risk, especially when they know more or less why it happened now.
The main issue was that for some, the fact that the person isn’t real isn’t a problem. For others, they spend the entire movie being a little on edge because their brain is screaming that something is wrong with the image they are seeing. I actually feel that a bit from Male V and the random guy, Jackie and Reed are okay though. While you might be enjoying the animated face of Solomon Reed acting out a scene, someone else might be subconsciously unnerved that it’s not actually Idris Elba. You could rate the show/movie highly for the plot, but the other person will tell anyone and everyone not to watch the creepy computer generated story. Thus those people either don’t go to see it or wait until it’s out of theaters or whatever, making another expensive flop.
People have been posting Ray Tracing pics from their Cyberpunk games recently. The technology to make something like you describe is getting closer but the NPCs would need to be scripted and carefully managed to get a show out of the engine for this game because their eyes are still kinda creepy sometimes. The PC eyes need work too, I think it’s one of many reasons why they disabled third person mode. It’s really easy to set off someone’s uncanny valley.
Yep expensive to get an idea look into Final Fantasy The Spirits Within
There are a few… maybe not to this level
Of quality but soon I’d imagine we’ll
Get there
I feel like every time they’ve tried to make one, it never really caught on with the public enough. Thinking of Final Fantasy the Spirits Within and all the Zemeckis movies. Maybe not the biggest sample size 😂
There have been multiple shows and movies that do have that quality. There’s a bunch of resident evil animated movies.
The question looks answered so I’m just joining the train to recommend cyberpunk media – Captain Lazerhawk on a Netflix. Once you give into the world it is a crazy fun trip
Someone needs to watch Beowulf
We had Adventures of Tin Tin
first pic is not a cinematic its actual gameplay. and the answer is yes.
It’s kind of difficult to differentiate between just 3d animation and something that looks like “game cinematics”.
But there are several cyberpunk animated series and movies that look more or less like video games.
* Blade Runner: Black Lotus
* Altered Carbon: Resleeved
* Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045
* Gantz:O
And plenty of animes use 3d to make production faster and cheaper compared to traditional drawn animation, but those are generally viewed unfavourably for looking cheap.
There’s also the youtube channel “xanadu” (@xanaduBlu) which has an Unreal engine based web show thing, made by I think one guy. Not too many episodes though.
If you specifically mean attempted realism but with 3d characters, you’ve got like 90% of Avatar being CGI or Planet of the Apes or even the Warcraft movie. Although those are all mixed cg and real actors.
This one movie Beowulf did it. I think. IDK 😶
Love death and robots had several episodes with very similar looking art design
It’s super expensive. That’s why CG rendered cinematics are usually very short. With current tech, it takes an obscene amount of time to render all that stuff and make it look good. Love, Death, and Robots is a good example. The episodes are short and concise.
There have been a handful attempts at making feature-length movies like this. Beowulf comes to mind. It’s not particularly good lol but I appreciated the effort that went into it, considering it’s relatively old at this point.
First one was Beowulf I think. Was hard as fuck to produce if I remember an old YT video.
Alita did something similar to this I guess it takes a lot of time and is very expensive but who knows maybe we will one day.
If you haven’t seen already they uploaded a [behind the scenes ](https://youtu.be/Q6L92ujZLjE?si=am0LgXjF0qDlR3o_) video.
It’s everything said before and also people who have to play the roles for why such stuff isn’t made for series or movies.
It’s expensive, yes, but with unreal engine 5 and AI mocap and AI in general the cost will plummet over the next couple years.
Yes, it is way more expensive, also with how wacky the cyberpunk universe is it deserved an anime
Have you seen Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV?
It’s very expensive and time consuming compared to live action+ CGI
Look at Final Fantasy movie. Nowadays, it would cost less though.
It’s extremely expensive and if realistic is what the filmmakers are going for it would probably be cheaper just to make it in live action instead of animating the entire movie like that. Plus from a Box office point of view making it live action would be the safer less risky choice.
Simple, MONEY
The cinematics in particular are stupid expensive and take a long time to make and fine tune. These probably took several months to years for what amounted to twenty minutes. You could theoretically make an entire movie or tv show with this quality but you’re looking at like a decade of work in which time all interest in the project could evaporate if your budget doesn’t go to. The return on investment would basically be non existent as well
Animation of this quality takes a long time. Love, Death, and Robots has episodes that look like this. But each episode is done by a different studio that probably worked on it for years
They exist and people usually don’t like them. Their whole complaint is that ‘it looks like a video game’. As if it’s a bad thing
There are production studios that do use video game IDEs like Unreal Engine, Unity, and CryEngine but there’s very few of them
Bc Hollywood doesn’t care about us